Shara McCallum


Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four poetry collections and lives in Pennsylvania.

Life and work

McCallum was born in Kingston, Jamaica to an African Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother. Her family migrated to the United States when she was nine. She graduated from the University of Miami, from the University of Maryland with an M.F.A., and from Binghamton University in New York with a PhD. She has taught at the Stonecoast MFA program.
McCallum directs the and taught creative writing and literature at Bucknell University. McCallum is now a professor of English at Penn State University. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family.
McCallum's work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Callaloo, Chelsea, The Iowa Review, Verse, Creative Nonfiction, Seneca Review, and Witness.

Reception

Shara McCallum's first collection, The Water Between Us, may be a typical first book of poetry that moves through the torments and glories of growing up, but it is not a typical collection. McCallum's poems are startling in their breadth of experience and language. From the beginning McCallum asks us to free our expectations with her apt epigraph, "Only the magic and the dream are true. All the rest's a lie"

The poems in The Water Between Us work to a compelling cumulative effect. The title of the collection, the poet’s first, refers not only to the water of birth but also to the mythological waters of memory and the unconscious.

Honors and awards

Full-length poetry collections
Nonfiction
Anthology publications